1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to fluid-handling devices and, more specifically, to remote control of fluid-handling devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Fluid-handling devices, such as valves, pumps, and various other forms of process equipment, in many use cases, are widely geographically distributed. For example, when such devices are used to extract petroleum products from an oil well, the associated fluid source or receptacle may be in a relatively remote location, as oil wells are generally distributed relative to one another and located remote from metropolitan areas. Similar issues arise in relation to petro-water disposal facilities, re-injection facilities, and petroleum pumping stations, all of which tend to be geographically distributed and include fluid-handling equipment.
When monitoring or controlling such sites, it can be time-consuming and expensive for a technician to manually adjust or otherwise control fluid-handling devices, as the technician will incur costs and delays by traveling to the device to make adjustments or gather data in person. And these adjustments and inspections often occur relatively frequently, as process conditions and market demand fluctuate, thereby further increasing costs.
Some systems exist for exercising remote monitoring of fluid-handling devices, such as various supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, but many of these systems fail when a network connection is lost. Remote logic controlling such systems generally ceases to exercise control when the remote logic is disconnected in the event of a network failure. Further, some SCADA systems require the installation of special-purpose software on a computing device in order to exercise control remotely, which tends to deter users from exercising remote control of fluid-handling devices due to the burden of configuring each computer from which remote control is exercised.